KILLEEN, Tex. — Even before a gunman killed three soldiers last week at Fort Hood, the homily for Sunday’s noon Mass at St. Joseph Catholic Church here was always going to be about death, a consequence of the year’s liturgical calendar two weeks before Easter.

But when the Rev. Matthew Kinney, the associate pastor at St. Joseph began to speak on Sunday, he could not ignore the second mass shooting in five years at the storied Army post just down the road. Every word of his homily about the death of Lazarus, from the Book of John, had urgent meaning for the parishioners who crowded into this city’s only Catholic parish not located on the sprawling Fort Hood.

“Why would a good God allow death?” Father Kinney asked his parishioners. “Why is it that God allows for death?”

But for this grieving city, where on Sunday morning an electronic billboard near a community center read, “Fort Hood, we are with you in prayer,” there were no easy answers.

At St. Joseph, the congregation prayed for the three deceased victims by name — Sgt. First Class Daniel M. Ferguson, Staff Sgt. Carlos A. Lazaney-Rodriguez and Sgt. Timothy W. Owens — and the soldier who was accused of killing them and wounding 16 other soldiers before taking his own life, Specialist Ivan A. Lopez.

One young man, seated in the back row, cried and wiped his eyes with a crumpled tissue. After the Mass, he waited to pray with Father Kinney.

Ahead of a planned memorial service at Fort Hood on Wednesday, which President Obama will attend, pastors across the area and their congregations honored the fallen. The Tabernacle Baptist Church declared in advance that its 11 a.m. service would be dedicated to the Fort Hood victims. And the First United Methodist Church of Killeen lit candles in their memory.

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Kathy Abad on Sunday at a memorial service at Tabernacle Baptist Church in Killeen, Tex., remembering Fort Hood shooting victims.CreditDrew Anthony Smith for The New York Times

As Killeen grappled with its renewed sense of loss, policy makers elsewhere were debating whether changes in military policy could prevent another mass shooting.

Representative Michael T. McCaul, Republican of Texas, and chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said Sunday that he supported allowing senior officers on military bases to carry weapons for protection. His comments were made on CBS’s “Face the Nation” and “Fox News Sunday.”

A bill that would repeal the ban on carrying firearms was introduced last year after the fatal shootings at the Washington Navy Yard, but has not moved forward.

“I think ideally what you’d want to have are more military police officers, but in the current budget climate, that’s not as realistic,” Mr. McCaul said. “So it seems to me a force multiplier of officers and enlisted men that we can trust, the senior leadership, to have them carry because, you know, that — it only takes a few minutes to wound and kill a large number of soldiers.”

But retired Adm. Michael Mullen, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, argued the opposite on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“I’m not one —as someone who has been on many, many bases and posts — that would argue for arming anybody who is on base,” Admiral Mullen said. “I think that actually invites much more difficult challenges.”

Retired Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the former vice chief of staff of the Army, said on ABC’s “This Week” that mental health is at the core of the problem.

“We don’t know enough about post-traumatic stress. We don’t know enough about traumatic brain injury,” General Chiarelli said. “We need to mount a national effort to get at this problem, and ensure that we do our research a lot smarter than we’ve done it in the past.”

Congressmen on several Sunday television shows emphasized the need to re-evaluate mental health treatment in the military.

“We have this crazy standard in the United States that says unless a person is on the verge of holding a knife to their own throat or someone else, we’re not going to step in,” Representative Tim Murphy, Republican of Pennsylvania, said on CNN. “We need to understand the dynamics of mental illness for in the military and outside the military.”

Just as Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan did in 2009 when he killed 13 people at Fort Hood, Specialist Lopez was able to bring a privately owned handgun onto the post undetected, military officials said. Soldiers at Fort Hood must register their firearms, which Army officials said Specialist Lopez failed to do with the weapon he used in last week’s attack. Fort Hood’s weapons rules rely in large part on the honor system and require all personnel bringing a privately owned firearm onto the base in a vehicle to declare that they are doing so and state why.

Military personnel who are not police officers are barred from carrying privately owned weapons on Army posts, concealed or unconcealed, but they are permitted in some cases to transport or store them there.

Critics of the military’s weapons policies have noted that many, if not all, of those killed in the pair of shootings at Fort Hood were unarmed, even though they were proficient with firearms, and have wondered whether the victims could have stopped the attacks if the Army’s restrictions had been different.

Asked Friday whether soldiers should be allowed to carry their personal firearms at Army posts, Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, said the issue should be explored, but not immediately.

“At this point today, we need to be focusing on the victims, praying for their recovery and helping this community come back together,” Mr. Cruz said when he visited Fort Hood to meet with wounded soldiers. “There will be plenty of time to have discussions about the public policy issues going forward.”

But among some family members of those who were injured in last week’s attack, the subject is already a matter for discussion.

“I think it’s a little bit ridiculous that you entrust soldiers with guns and you don’t allow them to have them,” John Miller, the father of Maj. Patrick Miller, said in a telephone interview on Saturday. “It just seems to me that if you had people armed at least, you wouldn’t have the mass killings that have happened.”

Major Miller, who was shot in the abdomen, is recovering from the attack, his father said.

Elena Schneider contributed reporting from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: A Community Mourns Soldiers Killed in Fort Hood Rampage. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe